Bell character

[2] To maintain backward compatibility, video display terminals (VDTs) that replaced teletypewriters included speakers or buzzers to perform the same function, as did the personal computers that followed.

Unicode does not give names to control characters but has assigned it the alias "ALERT" and abbreviation "BEL."

In the 5-bit Baudot codes, BEL is represented by the number 11 (0x0B) when in "figures" mode.

'a' stands for "alert" or "audible" and was chosen because \b was already used for the backspace character.

On POSIX systems, one may also use: and in the Bash shell, one may use ANSI-C quoting:[5] An alternative is to use the tput command, which as a part of the ncurses library is available on most Unix/Linux operating systems: A program can get the same result by printing the BEL character to a terminal.